Electronic Arts sprang a surprise on Tuesday by announcing the acquisition of Firemint, the mobile developer behind iPhone and iPad hits Flight Control and Real Racing.

The deal was for an undisclosed amount, but is the latest example of a big games publisher snapping up an independent mobile developer – last week, social games giant Zynga bought UK studio Wonderland Software.

According to Barry Cottle, vice president and general manager of EA Interactive, this industry consolidation should come as no surprise. "Because of iOS in particular, and the ease with which small developers are able to get to market, there are more of these players surfacing in the market with real material market achievements," he said in an interview with Apps Blog this afternoon.

"As the handset market has got more fragmented, so has the developer space. There's a plethora of really talented small shops out there able to get a breakthrough hit that people believe is repeatable. So this notion of small developers being acquired by larger players is probably more the type of acquisition that you're going to see going forward."

Does that mean EA is looking to buy more indie mobile developers to swell its ranks? Cottle won't be drawn into specifics, but hints that EA may well open its wallet again. "We're always looking at and talking to the independent third parties and seeing what type of relationship makes sense. It could be work for hire, a commercial relationship, or bringing them into the family. We want to be flexible."

Firemint will form a studio unit within EA, while another recent acquisition – mobile publisher Chillingo – will continue to focus on working with indie developers on a publishing basis. On which note, Cottle says despite the many column inches devoted to indie successes on Apple's App Store in particular, publishers still have a big role to play.

"The publishing relationship is going to get more and more important as this world continues to fragment and get chaotic," he says. "There is real value in publishing not just from a marketing and distribution perspective, but also scale and speed to market. There's a lot of value add that we can bring to third parties in a publishing relationship."

Cottle also thinks consolidation will be driven by the shift in business models from pure downloadable games to freemium titles using in-app payments, as well as paid games with regularly updated content. He claims mobile game publishers will look to existing console publishing structures, where individual internal studios work on specific franchises over time, rather than "just launching a game then moving on to the next one".

Alongside the Firemint announcement today, EA said it recently acquired another mobile gaming firm: cross-platform development and porting company Mobile Post Production (MPP). Cottle says that deal was about dealing with ongoing technical fragmentation with new mobile devices and operating systems, from Android to the BlackBerry PlayBook and Sony Ericsson Xperia Play.

"We all kinda hoped that over time we'd have to allocate less of our R&D dollars to porting and more to the creative process, but that hasn't happened," he says. "The world continues to get more fragmented. But we want to be there early [on new devices] to learn and understand, so that when we see success we are ready to jump on it. We want to see and understand these new market dynamics before our competitors."